Sunday, 28 August 2011

Unfortunately my Christmas Ale got infected, possibly from all the messing around trying to get it from the stockpot into the fermenter. It's sad to have to tip a batch down the drain. Hopefully the tap in the pot will prevent this happening again.

Sunday, 14 August 2011

Daz borrowed the pot to get his first all-grain on. He also enlisted his dad to get a tap fitted to the plot - which has duly been done. With a hop-stopper in it too. That should make things much much easier.

I haven't got the details to hand, but last week I brewed a Wassail Ale. Basically the Christmas Ale from Mosher's Radical Brewing. It was a massive nightmare if I'm honest. Ended up with 8.5kg of grain in the bag, which when soaked in the mash became, understandably very heavy. This meant that it took both Gemma and me to pull it out of the pot, we couldn't do the normal suspend and twist to drain wort out. When we tried to put it in the smaller pot for a dunk sparge, it just managed to spread wort all over the kitchen.

Post boil I ended up with about 7L at 1099! I did some back of an envelope calculations, boiled up some extract in water and added some additional water which brought us to about 1073 (from memory) and just shy of 15L.

Fermentation, with T-58 was rapid for the first couple of days. It got down to 1030. Checked it today after a full week in primary and it's still at 1028, so I've roused with a sanitised spoon.